If there's a good upgrade path and they keep support for Irix for a long time, users might not resist so much. Remember Sun burned a lot of users, first with the switch to Sparc and then with the switch to Solaris. People got over it.
SGI might have a better time of it than Sun did because people buy SGI for the hardware. People buy Sun for the software.
It's funny that Microsoft wants us to believe that Linux and NT are the only real competitors in the server market. They're trying to defeat IBM, HP, and Sun (their real competitors in the high-end market) by excluding them from the contest.
The next step is to publish white papers like "Linux or Windows 2000, which is better for your enterprise?". Lets face it, neither Windows nor Linux is ready for seriously massive enterprise deployment today. But if MS can make it seem like these are the only choices they might take market share away from the companies that really have viable products.
1/ Caldera and others are creating point and click interfaces for Linux,
2/ Everybody I know who's currently in the education system (and most of the Unix admins I know) is into Linux. In three years the market will be teaming with Linux admins. In ten years those Linux admins will be making purchasing decisions.
Yeah, Slashdot probably shouldn't make a habit out of announcing 'ac' releases, but it would be good to pound on this one a little. Given all the glitches with the 2.2.x tree, it's important that we get a rock solid 2.2.11. The best way to make that happen is to try 2.2.10ac11 and report any bugs.
IBM and Sun are more than ready to fight off NT on the high end. Leave the big iron to them. Linux is poised to threaten Microsoft on the desktop and small servers - that's where we should focus our attention. Big servers might be sexy, but the low end is strategic.
Microsoft needs the desktop and ISP market 1/for revenue, 2/to leverage other products. If Linux can continue to nip away at the low end Microsoft will start to feel it in the pocketbook, and worse, they won't be able to use their dominance to take over the server market.
I don't really understand where they're going with this. They've got this massive project (Monterey) going to with SCO and Sequent to bring AIX to Intel boxes. Now they're putting Linux on RS/6000s? Strange.
Perhaps they're having trouble selling RS/6000s in to the ISP market and are hoping Linux will give them a way in. If I could get an ATX motherboard with a PPC for a decent price I might even go for it, but I certainly wouldn't pay the normal RS/6000 prices for one of these babies.
It sounds like he's concentrated on getting the command line programs working and doesn't have a GUI yet. Since (I'm guessing) the GUI is the bulk of the work, this hardly counts as a Windows clone.
But, I actually like the approach. I wonder if the Wine folks wouldn't have made faster progress by following the same strategy. As it is now, there are lots of programs that "sort of do something" under Wine, but few useful ones that really work 100%. If the command line stuff worked WELL it might draw more developers to finish the job.
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind had a "technology demonstration" a few weeks ago. There was a vendor showing off something similar. The mouse gave tactical feedback as it passed from one menu item to the other. It also moved on its own to a dialog box when one popped up.
I had a hard time getting used to a "live" mouse - it's a little disconcerting - but I can see how it might be useful.
The real innovation I saw there, however, was a simple office suite designed specifically for the blind or visually impaired. I think Open Source could really be valuable here since the market isn't large enough to support big commercial investment. You take an Open Source word-processor and rewrite the user interface. It works much better than all the magnifying devices that blow up a windows application so you can only see a square inch at a time.
you're missing the point that the free software community can focus on something as well
I have noticed the attention this benchmark is getting and all the improvements that are being made to kick-butt the next time, but...
Microsoft can stick a few dozen top-notch kernel hackers in the same building with a few dozen top-notch web-server developers and give them as much equipment as they need, including hardware debuggers and protocol analyzers. Pay them reasonably well and promise a 100% bonus for beating Linux and they WILL squeeze every bit of performance out of IIS and NT.
Even MS can't take this approach to everything at once. Even if they had the money, the different groups would be stepping all over each other. But if Bill identifies a narrow goal and throws a few million dollars at it, it will be done.
If our goal is to beat MS then we have to play to OUR strengths. The invisible Open Source hand will put a few people on the Mindcraft case and I'm sure the results will be impressive. But our advocates need to emphasize that, even while our web server performance improves, Gnome/KDE continue to make strides. The documentation gets better. And so on.... Linux isn't about serving static web pages or any specific benchmarks.
Petreley's comment that Microsoft will try to refocus the argument to something it can win is right on the money. IMHO that's what this Mindcraft thing is about.
We'd do well to avoid raising a specific metric (like serving static web pages) to being somehow more important than all the other aspects of Linux. The advantage that MS (and any Cathedral) has is the ability to throw a lot of coordinated resources at a specific problem. If we buy into the idea that a certain contest defines which platform is better, Microsoft can make sure it wins that particular contest. Imagine: "Linux community devastated as Windows wins web server benchmark five years in a row."
The strength of Linux is thousands of people making incremental improvements in all sorts of areas. The distributions are making things easier to use. Researchers are working on distributed processing. The kernel hackers are working on SMP. Systems administrators everywhere are working on admin tools. It adds up to an operating system that evolves in a million different ways to meet the needs of real users.
That's not to say that we can't beat MS at serving static pages. As long as MS keeps trying to win all the battles they probably won't win any. But if they can succeed in narrowing the debate to "if Windows is better at X then Linux must suck" they WILL do whatever is needed to make Windows better at X.
They're distributing it with their apps!
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Corel Linux FAQ
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The question on whether or not they plan on distributing CLD separate from their applications implies that they WILL be distributing it with their applications.
I know Corel doesn't have huge market-share nowadays, but they're still nothing to sneeze at. Imagine if every Corel application came with a complete Linux distribution in the box. Millions of end-users would suddenly find themselves with Linux CDs (kind of like the AOL coasters that used to be everywhere).
If Corel does this right it's not hard to imagine a scenario where several million Corel users install Linux as an upgrade to their Windows boxes.
"Hmm. It says if I click 'yes' my computer will be faster and won't crash so much. Hey, it worked! But where did my QuickBooks go?"
It's open-source, so port it!
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Corel Linux FAQ
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Corel is open-sourcing it and I suspect it will be 99.9% C or C++. You should be able to port it to any processor Linux supports with a recompile.
They might write some hardware-specific device probes and you'd have to work out how booting works on your target platform. But most non-intel platforms have fewer hardware hassles and the booting has been figured out by somebody for some distro already.
I think they'll address this...
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Corel Linux FAQ
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They say that they want to make Linux easier for end users to install, but in my experience it's already pretty easy. The sticking points are disk partitioning (a relatively easy thing to fix, I think) and video card setup (harder to fix).
I suspect that when they sit down and try to improve the installation they'll end up focusing on video
Linux hardware support is actually very good. Your video card is probably already supported, if only you could figure out how to set it up.
I'm glad that more stuff is coming out for Linux, but I used to administer a Netware network and it's sad it struggling. For what it does Netware is fantastic and NDS _IS_ the greatest thing since sliced bread. Linux (and even NT) will have something like NDS some day, but I think it'll be quite a few years.
Nobody has mentioned that committing to a Linux port is really a no-brainer for Lotus. They've got Unix versions already and Linux will be EASY. What they're really saying is: "Novell has lots of users but the huge development effort required for the port doesn't justify the risk. A Linux port, however, will cost next to nothing and people seem to want it, so we'll go ahead with it."
This shouldn't be seen as a Novell vs. Linux thing, because Linux doesn't really require any effort. The news here is that Novell is losing vendor support.
Let RedHat, Oracle, IBM, Caldera, Corel, and anybody else who has a vested interest in fighting Microsoft deal with this.
The correct response for Linux users/hackers is to keep doing what you've always done. Use the OS you like best. Code the apps you want to use. If you see a good application for Linux in your company, lobby to get it deployed. That's what will make Linux better.
What happens in the "commercial" world is interesting and I really hope Microsoft gets thrashed, but it doesn't really affect us directly.
Lots of Windows users I know don't pay for anything either. That has less to do with the operating system than the financial ability of the individual.
Companies (like the Canadian National Railway) that deploy Linux DO pay for stuff. Certainly the people who would be buying expensive SGI boxes pay for stuff.
If all the proprietary OS vendors switch to Open Source I think this will be a good thing. If there is only one Open Source OS left standing this will be a bad thing. But I see no evidence that this will happen.
The *BSD folks are doing excellent work and aren't going to stop anytime soon. There are a number of "alternative" OS projects that are moving slowly. They'll continue to exist as long as there are hackers keen on doing something different. Choice seems to be alive and well.
Linux (a piece of software) doesn't compete with SGI (a hardware manufacturer that happens to write software). Continued development of Irix just eats at SGI's bottom line. If they can get a high performance OS more cheaply by contributing to Linux, then it makes good business sense to do so. I know they're not abandoning Irix at this point, but they will when Linux offers everthing Irix does (say three years?).
By adopting Linux, SGI is 1/strengthening Linux on high-end hardware, 2/adding to the momentum of the Linux bandwagon, 3/providing more installed seats for Linux which means more applications will be ported 4/making expensive SGI boxes a natural migration path for cheap Intel boxes.
The only major Unix vendor that doesn't stand to benefit from the broad acceptance of Linux is SCO. And, surprise, they are the only major Unix vendor that hasn't come out in support of Linux. I have no idea how they think they're going to compete in the long term.
Netcraft uses ident info returned by the web server. This would still be available to both Netcraft and script-kiddies.
DOS attacks on the card might be a problem, but I imagine they would be upgradable. Also, the higher levels of the protocol would still need to be on the main processor. Presumably workarounds would still be possible.
I worked with an expensive Intel NIC 9 years ago that had an i960(I think) and an OSI protocol stack on board. Never did any benchmarks, but I'm guessing the complex OSI protocol stack plus wimpy ISA '386 boxes made putting intelligence on the NIC a good idea at the time.
I figure there must be a good reason these things haven't gone mainstream in almost a decade. The proliferation of simple TCP/IP plus faster CPUs might be one reason.
Note that the FSF can and will change the GPL to adapt to whatever happens. If a weakness is found it will be fixed. Free Software authors will simply change the wording to say "version X of the GPL or later".
The only way to really break things is to subvert the FSF. That's why I like the fact that RMS seems like such a zealot sometimes. He's certainly more extreme than me, but I will always use the GPL because I trust him to stick to his principles and defend free software. Extremists have their place, especially when fighting for principles.
Of course, even subverting the FSF won't have many long-term effects, since the real strength is in the community of coders. As long as enough people adhere to the idea of free software it will continue to exist.
They're still doing OK, but now that the major DB vendors have come out with Linux versions, they're going to start losing customers.
Most of their customer (I think) come from vertical market applications. The software developers have no real loyalty to SCO, they just use it because it's Unix and runs on cheap boxes. Linux is cheaper and faster and switching is easy for them. SCO should be afraid.
Instead of bashing Linux they need to change their business model while they're still making money. Either push their own Linux distribution (with special 'SCO compatibility' and 'millions of dollars of testing' for added value) or open up their own Unix and distribute it for free. I think the first option has a lot more chance of working.
I'm curious about this too. I wonder if people who pay Netcraft money get that kind of breakdown.
One thing to remember is that Netcraft counts domains, not IP addresses. ISPs that host sites for clients probably dominate the survey and most of them run Apache. Companies that run their own web site off a T1 or ISDN line probably favour NT, but they would be in the minority.
I like to take each months numbers and pretend that nobody is switching (clearly not true, but might be a good approximation). This month, for example, Apache gained 423063 sites and MS gained 132943. So new Apache sites outnumbered new MS sites by MORE THAN 3 TO 1! That's impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
If there's a good upgrade path and they keep support for Irix for a long time, users might not resist so much. Remember Sun burned a lot of users, first with the switch to Sparc and then with the switch to Solaris. People got over it.
SGI might have a better time of it than Sun did because people buy SGI for the hardware. People buy Sun for the software.
It's funny that Microsoft wants us to believe that Linux and NT are the only real competitors in the server market. They're trying to defeat IBM, HP, and Sun (their real competitors in the high-end market) by excluding them from the contest.
The next step is to publish white papers like "Linux or Windows 2000, which is better for your enterprise?". Lets face it, neither Windows nor Linux is ready for seriously massive enterprise deployment today. But if MS can make it seem like these are the only choices they might take market share away from the companies that really have viable products.
Two things come into play:
1/ Caldera and others are creating point and click interfaces for Linux,
2/ Everybody I know who's currently in the education system (and most of the Unix admins I know) is into Linux. In three years the market will be teaming with Linux admins. In ten years those Linux admins will be making purchasing decisions.
Yeah, Slashdot probably shouldn't make a habit out of announcing 'ac' releases, but it would be good to pound on this one a little. Given all the glitches with the 2.2.x tree, it's important that we get a rock solid 2.2.11. The best way to make that happen is to try 2.2.10ac11 and report any bugs.
IBM and Sun are more than ready to fight off NT on the high end. Leave the big iron to them. Linux is poised to threaten Microsoft on the desktop and small servers - that's where we should focus our attention. Big servers might be sexy, but the low end is strategic.
Microsoft needs the desktop and ISP market 1/for revenue, 2/to leverage other products. If Linux can continue to nip away at the low end Microsoft will start to feel it in the pocketbook, and worse, they won't be able to use their dominance to take over the server market.
I don't really understand where they're going with this. They've got this massive project (Monterey) going to with SCO and Sequent to bring AIX to Intel boxes. Now they're putting Linux on RS/6000s? Strange.
Perhaps they're having trouble selling RS/6000s in to the ISP market and are hoping Linux will give them a way in. If I could get an ATX motherboard with a PPC for a decent price I might even go for it, but I certainly wouldn't pay the normal RS/6000 prices for one of these babies.
It sounds like he's concentrated on getting the command line programs working and doesn't have a GUI yet. Since (I'm guessing) the GUI is the bulk of the work, this hardly counts as a Windows clone.
But, I actually like the approach. I wonder if the Wine folks wouldn't have made faster progress by following the same strategy. As it is now, there are lots of programs that "sort of do something" under Wine, but few useful ones that really work 100%. If the command line stuff worked WELL it might draw more developers to finish the job.
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind had a "technology demonstration" a few weeks ago. There was a vendor showing off something similar. The mouse gave tactical feedback as it passed from one menu item to the other. It also moved on its own to a dialog box when one popped up.
I had a hard time getting used to a "live" mouse - it's a little disconcerting - but I can see how it might be useful.
The real innovation I saw there, however, was a simple office suite designed specifically for the blind or visually impaired. I think Open Source could really be valuable here since the market isn't large enough to support big commercial investment. You take an Open Source word-processor and rewrite the user interface. It works much better than all the magnifying devices that blow up a windows application so you can only see a square inch at a time.
I have noticed the attention this benchmark is getting and all the improvements that are being made to kick-butt the next time, but...
Microsoft can stick a few dozen top-notch kernel hackers in the same building with a few dozen top-notch web-server developers and give them as much equipment as they need, including hardware debuggers and protocol analyzers. Pay them reasonably well and promise a 100% bonus for beating Linux and they WILL squeeze every bit of performance out of IIS and NT.
Even MS can't take this approach to everything at once. Even if they had the money, the different groups would be stepping all over each other. But if Bill identifies a narrow goal and throws a few million dollars at it, it will be done.
If our goal is to beat MS then we have to play to OUR strengths. The invisible Open Source hand will put a few people on the Mindcraft case and I'm sure the results will be impressive. But our advocates need to emphasize that, even while our web server performance improves, Gnome/KDE continue to make strides. The documentation gets better. And so on.... Linux isn't about serving static web pages or any specific benchmarks.
Petreley's comment that Microsoft will try to refocus the argument to something it can win is right on the money. IMHO that's what this Mindcraft thing is about.
We'd do well to avoid raising a specific metric (like serving static web pages) to being somehow more important than all the other aspects of Linux. The advantage that MS (and any Cathedral) has is the ability to throw a lot of coordinated resources at a specific problem. If we buy into the idea that a certain contest defines which platform is better, Microsoft can make sure it wins that particular contest. Imagine: "Linux community devastated as Windows wins web server benchmark five years in a row."
The strength of Linux is thousands of people making incremental improvements in all sorts of areas. The distributions are making things easier to use. Researchers are working on distributed processing. The kernel hackers are working on SMP. Systems administrators everywhere are working on admin tools. It adds up to an operating system that evolves in a million different ways to meet the needs of real users.
That's not to say that we can't beat MS at serving static pages. As long as MS keeps trying to win all the battles they probably won't win any. But if they can succeed in narrowing the debate to "if Windows is better at X then Linux must suck" they WILL do whatever is needed to make Windows better at X.
The question on whether or not they plan on distributing CLD separate from their applications implies that they WILL be distributing it with their applications.
I know Corel doesn't have huge market-share nowadays, but they're still nothing to sneeze at. Imagine if every Corel application came with a complete Linux distribution in the box. Millions of end-users would suddenly find themselves with Linux CDs (kind of like the AOL coasters that used to be everywhere).
If Corel does this right it's not hard to imagine a scenario where several million Corel users install Linux as an upgrade to their Windows boxes.
"Hmm. It says if I click 'yes' my computer will be faster and won't crash so much. Hey, it worked! But where did my QuickBooks go?"
Corel is open-sourcing it and I suspect it will be 99.9% C or C++. You should be able to port it to any processor Linux supports with a recompile.
They might write some hardware-specific device probes and you'd have to work out how booting works on your target platform. But most non-intel platforms have fewer hardware hassles and the booting has been figured out by somebody for some distro already.
They say that they want to make Linux easier for end users to install, but in my experience it's already pretty easy. The sticking points are disk partitioning (a relatively easy thing to fix, I think) and video card setup (harder to fix).
I suspect that when they sit down and try to improve the installation they'll end up focusing on video
Linux hardware support is actually very good. Your video card is probably already supported, if only you could figure out how to set it up.
TrueType fonts are great, but anti-aliased fonts are more important (IMHO). Does anybody know if this is part of 4.0?
Not that everything HAS to be free. But I think (and hopefully I'm wrong) that NDS will be a hard sell because the benefits aren't really tangible.
I think funky LDAP integration will give Linux everything NDS has some day, but it's not there yet and won't be for a while.
I'm glad that more stuff is coming out for Linux, but I used to administer a Netware network and it's sad it struggling. For what it does Netware is fantastic and NDS _IS_ the greatest thing since sliced bread. Linux (and even NT) will have something like NDS some day, but I think it'll be quite a few years.
Nobody has mentioned that committing to a Linux port is really a no-brainer for Lotus. They've got Unix versions already and Linux will be EASY. What they're really saying is: "Novell has lots of users but the huge development effort required for the port doesn't justify the risk. A Linux port, however, will cost next to nothing and people seem to want it, so we'll go ahead with it."
This shouldn't be seen as a Novell vs. Linux thing, because Linux doesn't really require any effort. The news here is that Novell is losing vendor support.
Let RedHat, Oracle, IBM, Caldera, Corel, and anybody else who has a vested interest in fighting Microsoft deal with this.
The correct response for Linux users/hackers is to keep doing what you've always done. Use the OS you like best. Code the apps you want to use. If you see a good application for Linux in your company, lobby to get it deployed. That's what will make Linux better.
What happens in the "commercial" world is interesting and I really hope Microsoft gets thrashed, but it doesn't really affect us directly.
Lots of Windows users I know don't pay for anything either. That has less to do with the operating system than the financial ability of the individual.
Companies (like the Canadian National Railway) that deploy Linux DO pay for stuff. Certainly the people who would be buying expensive SGI boxes pay for stuff.
If all the proprietary OS vendors switch to Open Source I think this will be a good thing. If there is only one Open Source OS left standing this will be a bad thing. But I see no evidence that this will happen.
The *BSD folks are doing excellent work and aren't going to stop anytime soon. There are a number of "alternative" OS projects that are moving slowly. They'll continue to exist as long as there are hackers keen on doing something different. Choice seems to be alive and well.
Linux (a piece of software) doesn't compete with SGI (a hardware manufacturer that happens to write software). Continued development of Irix just eats at SGI's bottom line. If they can get a high performance OS more cheaply by contributing to Linux, then it makes good business sense to do so. I know they're not abandoning Irix at this point, but they will when Linux offers everthing Irix does (say three years?).
By adopting Linux, SGI is 1/strengthening Linux on high-end hardware, 2/adding to the momentum of the Linux bandwagon, 3/providing more installed seats for Linux which means more applications will be ported 4/making expensive SGI boxes a natural migration path for cheap Intel boxes.
The only major Unix vendor that doesn't stand to benefit from the broad acceptance of Linux is SCO. And, surprise, they are the only major Unix vendor that hasn't come out in support of Linux. I have no idea how they think they're going to compete in the long term.
Netcraft uses ident info returned by the web server. This would still be available to both Netcraft and script-kiddies.
DOS attacks on the card might be a problem, but I imagine they would be upgradable. Also, the higher levels of the protocol would still need to be on the main processor. Presumably workarounds would still be possible.
I worked with an expensive Intel NIC 9 years ago that had an i960(I think) and an OSI protocol stack on board. Never did any benchmarks, but I'm guessing the complex OSI protocol stack plus wimpy ISA '386 boxes made putting intelligence on the NIC a good idea at the time.
I figure there must be a good reason these things haven't gone mainstream in almost a decade. The proliferation of simple TCP/IP plus faster CPUs might be one reason.
Note that the FSF can and will change the GPL to adapt to whatever happens. If a weakness is found it will be fixed. Free Software authors will simply change the wording to say "version X of the GPL or later".
The only way to really break things is to subvert the FSF. That's why I like the fact that RMS seems like such a zealot sometimes. He's certainly more extreme than me, but I will always use the GPL because I trust him to stick to his principles and defend free software. Extremists have their place, especially when fighting for principles.
Of course, even subverting the FSF won't have many long-term effects, since the real strength is in the community of coders. As long as enough people adhere to the idea of free software it will continue to exist.
They're still doing OK, but now that the major DB vendors have come out with Linux versions, they're going to start losing customers.
Most of their customer (I think) come from vertical market applications. The software developers have no real loyalty to SCO, they just use it because it's Unix and runs on cheap boxes. Linux is cheaper and faster and switching is easy for them. SCO should be afraid.
Instead of bashing Linux they need to change their business model while they're still making money. Either push their own Linux distribution (with special 'SCO compatibility' and 'millions of dollars of testing' for added value) or open up their own Unix and distribute it for free. I think the first option has a lot more chance of working.
I'm curious about this too. I wonder if people who pay Netcraft money get that kind of breakdown.
One thing to remember is that Netcraft counts domains, not IP addresses. ISPs that host sites for clients probably dominate the survey and most of them run Apache. Companies that run their own web site off a T1 or ISDN line probably favour NT, but they would be in the minority.
I like to take each months numbers and pretend that nobody is switching (clearly not true, but might be a good approximation). This month, for example, Apache gained 423063 sites and MS gained 132943. So new Apache sites outnumbered new MS sites by MORE THAN 3 TO 1! That's impressive.